


never wash the sand from my feet

by mustachio



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil Is Not Described, Fluff, Headcanon, M/M, POV Carlos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 20:23:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustachio/pseuds/mustachio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos has loved the beach all his life. Cecil has never known the beach. Carlos takes it upon himself to bring his two favorite things together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	never wash the sand from my feet

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from The Beach by All Time Low.

Carlos dreams of crashing waves.

He dreams of salt in his eyes and sand in his hair and seaweed brushing against his leg.

He dreams of these things and wakes with the taste of salt on his tongue and a longing he can’t satisfy.

Growing up in Mexico gave him a few opportunities to go to the beach. His mother took him occasionally when he was young and as a teenager he and his friends would hang out there, enjoying the sounds of the ocean and the warmth of the sun. Carlos lost his virginity on the beach. He lost it to a friend he hasn’t spoken to in years, but who respected him and his boundaries in a way he never expected from a one night stand. It was as awkward and shy as any first time is, but it was nice, all things considered. It was nice to lie under the stars with someone he cared about but didn’t quite love and who felt the same about him. They forgot to bring a blanket. 

The rough sand scratching his back is his most prominent memory about that night.

Carlos ended up at Stanford University for Undergrad. It was expensive, more expensive than it had any right to be, but his scholarships managed to pay what his family could not and it was worth it. California’s beaches lived up to their reputation. He never has sex on the beach again, but he remembers spending drunken nights with friends who sometimes spoke too fast and made offensive comments without meaning to, and who never apologized when it was pointed out. Carlos had his first fist fight on the beach, when they’d all had too much alcohol and someone said something he can’t even remember now, but leaves a faint pang in his heart when he tries to recall. He can’t remember much of the fight. Just that there was no blood and neither of them looked any worse off the next morning and they all tried to go back to the way things were.

The feeling of rough hands trying to hold him back and shouts that sounded vaguely like his own name always stand out in his mind.

For Grad school he found himself at MIT and the beaches he visited during that time were different, disappointing. They didn’t make him feel the same way the beaches on the west coast made him feel. He could never be sure if it was because he was suddenly questioning whether or not science was the right path for him or if it was because he’s homesick or if it was something else altogether. In the end he just decided that he didn’t like those beaches for some arbitrary reason. The first time he ever smoked was on one of those beaches and it made him feel as unpleasant as the beach itself. It was Canadian pot, apparently like ten times stronger than the American stuff, but Carlos never tried it again to find out. It made him nauseous, scratched his throat, and the high was not worth it. He’d later find that he preferred cigarettes, anyway, got hooked on those instead to get him through long nights in the lab.

His mother hit him, stopped speaking to him for a week when he came home for the holidays, and she caught him smoking on the back porch. According to her his two PhDs and one Masters were worth nothing as long as he kept smoking. He did. She never found out.

He gets to Night Vale and finds that he misses the east coast beaches that made him feel awful about himself and also that the majority of the people here don’t believe in mountains. He doesn’t find out that the man on the radio is apparently in love with him until a few days after his first day in Night Vale when he finally listens to his recordings of the show. It’s creepy and weird and Carlos finds that he can’t stop recording the show each night, even when he determines there’s no useful data to be found from them. He just likes listening to that voice every night before he falls asleep.

It’s only when the City Council interferes that he finds himself dreaming about something other than the beach.

A year and some months later when “the man on the radio” is Cecil and his apartment above the lab is their house, he’ll get sick of the dreams. The sinking feeling he gets every time he thinks about how Cecil has never heard the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, or tasted the salt on his skin after being in the ocean, or gotten sand in places where sand ought not to be is unbearable now. He keeps thinking of how awful it must have been for Cecil to never have the chance to experience those things. He keeps thinking of how great the beach is and how Cecil has been missing out on so much.

A year and some months after his arrival in Night Vale, Carlos will take a trip to the Night Vale jewelry shop and take all the necessary precautions to ensure that Cecil remains unaware of his trip and the purchases he makes on it. He’ll make sure that Cecil never knows that Carlos appealed to the City Council to allow them to leave for an undisclosed amount of time until Cecil comes home complaining about how he was forced to record “like a year’s worth of shows or something” when really it should have only been two weeks.

A year and some months after his arrival in Night Vale, Carlos takes Cecil to the beach. Carlos takes him into the ocean, holds him when something completely mundane for the real world yet awful for Night Vale happens, and brings him to sit on the beach towel he brought so they can eat and lie under the stars and look at the constellations that Cecil claims are all wrong. Cecil complains about the sand getting in his hair at one point, so Carlos moves them to the hood of his car where they sit like they did that night in the Arby’s parking lot and checks to make sure the little box is still in his pocket.

A year and some months after his arrival in Night Vale, when Carlos has brought Cecil to the same beach he punched a friend’s nose on, when he’s finally quit smoking because Cecil didn’t like it and never hit him to get him to quit, Carlos slips off the hood of his car. He claims it’s to tie his shoe, Cecil keeps looking at the stars. Carlos takes the little box out of his pocket, continues to kneel on one knee, and kisses Cecil’s knee to get his attention. Carlos barely gets the question out before Cecil is throwing his arms around Carlos, repeating “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes” over and over and over again between the kisses pressed to every inch of Carlos’s face.

The feeling of being happier than he’d ever thought he could be is a feeling he will never forget.


End file.
